MODULE 3

ON BECOMING A GLOBAL TEACHER

Being world-class does not mean going internationally and showing our best out there. Being
world –class is a passion and commitment to our profession; being world class is giving our
best to teaching. Being world class starts right inside the classroom. --- Condrado de Quiros

Introduction
Our world has been called a “global village”. Satellite communications make possible
television, telephone and documents transmitted through fax and electronic mails across
thousands of miles in thousands of seconds. Our students can view global warfare in the Middle
East, famine in Africa, industrial pollution in Europe or industrial breakthrough in Korea or Japan
through a world wide web of the information highway.

Global education poses variety of goals ranging from increased knowledge about the
peoples of the world to resolutions of global problems, from increased fluency in foreign
languages to the development of more tolerant attitudes towards other cultures and peoples.
Global education embraces today’s challenges as national borders are opened. It paves the way
for borderless education to respond to the needs of educating children of the world they are
entering. It offers new curricular dimensions and possibilities, current scientific and technological
breakthroughs for completely new frontiers in education.
Contemporary curricula respond to the concept of this global village. The increased use
of technology in the classroom, the incorporation of the changing realities of our world’s society
and the ease of mobility of peoples of the world have become a challenge to your preparation as
prospective teachers.
Hence, future teachers like you should prepare to respond to these multiple challenges.
To become global teacher you should be equipped with a wider range of knowledge of the
various educational systems outside the country; master skills and competencies which can
address global demands and possess attitudes and values that are acceptable to multicultural
communities. When you are able to satisfy these benchmark requirements then you can safely
say you have prepared well to be a great teacher of the world.
As future teachers, think globally, but act locally. You can be a global teacher by being the
best teacher in your school.
Objectives of the module:
1. Gain clear understanding of what a global teacher is in context of global education
 2. Enrich your insights on global education by analyzing and comparing the education
of selected countries of the world
3. Describe multicultural diversity as an element of global education and the role of
the teacher in addressing diversity among learners
4. Identify opportunities in teacher exchange programs for the development of
world class teachers
5. Describe global application of technology in the classroom
Lesson 1
Global Education and the Global Teacher

“Benchmarking is learning the best from the best practices of the world’s best educational
systems.”

Lesson 1 will introduce the general concept of global education and define the global
teacher. This introductory lesson will give you a clear perspective of how you would become that
global teacher. After understanding the two concepts, you will be able to prepare yourself for
the succeeding lessons.
How do you prepare yourself as teachers for a challenging task of making learners of
today live meaningful lives tomorrow? As you prepare your children for their future, teachers
need to explore what the future holds. Teachers have to envision creative, innovative ways to
prepare diverse learners in their own cultural context without forgetting that they live in a global
village.
To compete globally would mean to prepare teachers who are capable of changing
lifelong education needs. How do you prepare for these needs? What are the emerging
technologies that will shape the future? How can we use our technologies for best learning
advantage? What will be the jobs of the future and how should curricula be shaped to prepare
students for their future?
You will be teaching in the “Flat World” or One Planet Schoolhouse”. These two terms
imply global education as a result of shrinking world due to access in technology. The internet
globalizes communication by allowing users from around the world to connect to one another.

Global Education
Global education has been best described by two definitions:
UNESCO defines global education as a goal to become aware of the educational
conditions or lack of it, in developing countries worldwide and aim to educate all peoples to a
certain world standards.
Another definition is that global education is a curriculum that is international in scope
which prepares today’s youth around the world to function in one world environment under
teachers who are intellectually, professionally and humanistically prepared.
 The United Nations entered into an agreement to pursue six (6) goals to achieve some
standards of education in place by 2015 worldwide. To achieve global education, the UN sets the
following goals
1. Expand early childhood care education
2. Provide free and compulsory primary education for all
3. Promote learning and life skills for young and adult
4. Increase adult literacy by 50%
5. Achieve gender parity by 2005, gender equality by 2015 and
6. Improve quality of education
In 2000, the Philippines committed itself to the above EFA 2015 Goals at the World
Education Forum in Dakar.
James Becker (1982) defined global education as an effort to help individual learners to
see the world as a single and global system and to see themselves as a participant in that system.
It is a school curriculum that has a worldwide standard of teaching and learning. This curriculum
prepares learners in an international marketplace with a world view of international
understanding. In his article “Goals of Global Education”, Becker emphasized that global
education incorporated into the curriculum and educational experiences of each student a
knowledge and empathy of cultures of the nation of the world.
Likewise, students are encouraged to see the world as a whole, learn various cultures to
make them better relate and function effectively within various cultural groups.
Thus, to meet the various global challenges of the future, the 21st Century Learning Goals
have been established as bases of various curricula worldwide. These learning goals include:
●21st century content emerging content areas such as global awareness financial,
economic, business and entrepreneurship literacy, civic literacy, health and awareness
●learning and thinking skills, critical thinking and problem-solving skills, communication,
creativity and innovation, collaboration, contextual learning, information and media literacy
●ICT literacy, using technology in the context of learning so students know how to learn
●life skills, leadership, ethics, accountability, personal responsibility , self direction and
others
●21st century assessment, authentic assessment that measure the areas of learning
Global education is all about diversity, understanding the differences and teaching the
different cultural groups in order to achieve the goals of global education as presented by the
United Nations. It is educating all peoples in the world from the remote and rugged rural villages
in developing countries to the slum areas of urbanized countries to the highly influential and
economically stable societies of the world. Global education addresses the need of the smallest
schools to the largest classrooms in the world. It responds to borderless education that defies
distance and geographical location.
Thus, global education provides equal opportunity and access to knowledge and learning
tools which are the basic rights of every child in the global community
Are our pre service teachers prepared to provide global education in their respective
future school assignments? Are you preparing yourselves to become a global teacher?
Global teacher
Looking back at the concept of global education how do we define now a global teacher?
Is this teacher somebody who teaches abroad? Is this person teaching anywhere in the world
and is able to teach the 21st century learning goals? These are some of the fundamental
questions which should be answered in order to understand who a global teacher is.
A global teacher is a competent teacher who is armed with enough skills, appropriate
attitude and universal values to teach students with both time tested as well as modern
technologies in education in any place in the world. He or she is someone who thinks and acts
both locally and globally with worldwide perspectives right in the communities where he or she
is situated.
More specifically, a global Filipino teacher should have the following qualities and
characteristics in addition to knowledge, skills and values
●understands how this world is interconnected
●recognizes that the world has rich variety of ways of life
●has a vision of the future sees what the future would be for him and the students
●must be creative and innovative
●must understand, respect and be tolerant of the diversity of cultures
●must believe and take action for education that will sustain the future
●must be able to facilitate digitally –mediated learning
●must have depth of knowledge
●must possess good communication (for Filipino teachers to be multi lingual)
And lastly but most importantly
 ●must possess the competencies of a professional teacher as embodied in the National
Competency -Based Standards for Teachers (NCBTS)
The need for global teachers is on the rise in several countries worldwide. Even developed
countries are in dire need of competent teachers who will man the countries rural and urban
classrooms. This is true with our neighboring countries like Singapore, Cambodia and Thailand.